In Cantonsville Maryland there is a recent anti-war protest. Nine members of a catholic church broke into the selective service building and took all the draft cards and either drenched them in blood or put them in wired baskets and covered them in homemade napalm and lit them on fire. There are seven males and three females involved in this action, three of them where wearing clerical attire. It only takes a few minutes for the police and fire department to arrive and handle the situation. They decide to do this because they are tired of seeing young men get dragged into the draft unwillingly. The reason several priest participated is they thought their religious status would draw more attention to the situation. They are successful in this because the resistance to the draft grew stronger, and other members of the Catholic Church broke into their local office and destroyed draft cards. There trial is hectic because thousands of people wanted to hear what was happening in the trial but they closed the doors and surrounded the court house with police officers in full riot gear. Other forms of protest people marched from John Hopkins University to the War Memorial. While walking they chant “Free the Nine” and “Zero Spiro”. In their trial they tried to use freedom of speech as a defense but the Supreme Court overruled this because they never really said anything, instead they destroyed government property. Many of the members received three and half year jail sentences. The Melvilles the only married couple that participated, and John Hogan exhausted their appeals and went to jail, and David Darst died in a car accident before he could serve his sentence. Mary Moylan, George Mische, Tom Lewis, and Daniel and Phil Berrigann decided to flea and go underground. All of these people either surrendered to the F.B.I. or were captured by them. The last one being Moylan WHO surrendered in 1978.
This protest might lead to more incidents like this one in Cantonsville. It may also cause the government to either increase security at the Selective Service offices, or they might get rid of the draft all together. A third possibility is that they might pull out of Vietnam since most of the draft pressure has come from the U.S. involvement in the war, because previously there has been no pressure against the draft in previous wars. This could also have come from the civil rights movement where there is a strong fight of having the individual choose not his government. Such as being able to choose where a person goes to eat or whether or not they want to go fight a war that they do not believe in.
March For The Nine
This protest might lead to more incidents like this one in Cantonsville. It may also cause the government to either increase security at the Selective Service offices, or they might get rid of the draft all together. A third possibility is that they might pull out of Vietnam since most of the draft pressure has come from the U.S. involvement in the war, because previously there has been no pressure against the draft in previous wars. This could also have come from the civil rights movement where there is a strong fight of having the individual choose not his government. Such as being able to choose where a person goes to eat or whether or not they want to go fight a war that they do not believe in.